 B. Turning from Moore's conception of spirit to his proof of spiritual existence, we enter upon a wide tract of speculative argument repeatedly traversed by him. Now as in his antidote against atheism and his metaphysics, he treats the subject on the divine side with reference to a supreme spiritual existence, and again as in his essay on the immortality of the soul, he discusses the special question as to whether there is a spirit in man distinct from his bodily organization. The two aspects of the question are indissolubly united with him as with Smith and Cudworth, but his discursive genius takes sometimes the one and sometimes the other direction without keeping clearly before him their cohesion or organic relation. He traverses frequently the same course of argument and especially in his metaphysics diverges into descriptions of physical phenomena and their scientific explanation with a copiousness which, while it repels the modern reader, indicates a marvelous acquaintance with all the branches of science in his time. The singular fertility of Moore's genius shows itself in nothing more than in the facile fullness with which it ranges over almost every field of knowledge then open to the student. One of his most elaborate arguments in favor of spiritual existence is that which we have already considered drawn from the idea of extension and space. This idea remains an indestructible element of consciousness under every attempt to thrust it away. It implies therefore a reality and a reality which in his view does not come under the essential categories of matter. It is neither sensible, impenetrable, nor disruptible. On the contrary, it is one indivisible infinite and so it is the revelation or manifestation of an infinite divine being transcending matter and unmoved by its conditions. He devotes the sixth, seventh, and eighth chapters of his N. Caridium Metaphysicum to an elaboration of this argument. Other forms of argument are as follows. It is an essential property of matter that it is contingent, but the very idea of contingency implies a higher principle of necessity, something which depends not upon another but exists in and for itself. Further, that which is not contingent, which excludes one of the essential properties of matter, must be spiritual. The same argument is turned in a different form in the essay on the immortality of the soul. The idea which we have of God is that of an essence absolutely perfect. But such an essence cannot possibly be body. It must be something incorporeal. And so the very idea of God contains a reason or proof of spiritual existence. Again, the mere fact of motion or force implies something transcending matter. For the nature of matter is homogeneous. It is either at rest or in motion, but it has no specific differences in itself or no power of itself of passing from the one state to the other. In its own nature it is without any principle of motion. It may conserve that originally imparted to it. The primary impress or force may not require constant renewal any more than the matter itself requires to be constantly created anew. But it has no power of origination. And such a power can only be conceived as springing from a spiritual, self-subsisting cause. In other words, motion necessarily implies a mover outside of the thing or material phenomenon moved. Spirit is therefore the necessary analog of force. Still more strongly does the order of material phenomena imply a mind or ordering spirit behind. If the simple fact of motion proves the necessity of a power distinct from matter, there is in Moore's own language, quote, a further assurance of the truth from the consideration of the order and admirable effect of this motion in the world. Suppose matter could move itself, would mere matter with self-motion amount to that admirable wise contrivance of things which we see in the world. Can a blind impetus produce such effects with that accuracy and constancy that the more wise a man is, the more he will be assured that no wisdom can add, take away, or alter anything in the works of nature whereby they may be bettered. How can that therefore, which has not so much as sense, rise to the effects of the highest pitch of reason or intellect? Close quote. So he argues in the essay on the immortality of the soul and to the same effect at length in the second book of his antidote against atheism. While in his metaphysical manual he passes under review all the most important phenomena of nature, the double rotation of the earth, the flux and reflux of the ocean, the arrangement and movement of the heavenly bodies, the composition and effects of light, the processes of organization in plants and animals, and especially the operations of the human mind, all with a view of showing how impossible it is to account for them by mere mechanical laws. The argument is exactly of the same tenor with that which the modern theist urges against the Darwinian or any other materialistic hypothesis. Given matter even with the advantage of sense or an obscure protoplastic power, the orderly development of the world of life and still further of the world of thought appears impracticable. Quote. Assuredly, when all is summed up that can be imagined, it will fall short of the amount. Close quote. The motion of universal matter may be supposed, quote, to grind itself into the more rude and general delineation of nature, but it fails wholly to account for the diversities of animal species. Close quote. These diversities are only explicable as the outcome each of an underlying idea. And, quote, how is it conceivable that any particle of matter or many together, they're not existing yet in nature any animal, can have the idea impressed of the creature they are to frame. Close quote. How, in short, can the series of animal being, in all its beauty and variety, grow from the mere obscure shootings of an aboriginal plasticity? Still more, how can intelligence be flashed into being from the mere upward gropings of a power without consciousness or even life? This seemed to more, more impossible than that, quote, so many men, blind and dumb from their nativity, should join their forces and wits together to build a castle or carve a statue of such a creature as none of them ever knew of. Close quote. All these are arguments which more or less retain interest and meaning. The difficulties of a materialistic or merely mechanical hypothesis of the origin of life and thought are very much where they were. A wider induction of natural facts and closer observation of the variations which arise through long periods in natural species may have opened up possibilities of development unknown to the seventeenth century, but they have done nothing more. So far, therefore, the principles of our author's argumentation are not out of date. But he was not content in any of his writings, even in his metaphysics, to appeal to argument alone on this great subject. He had always in reserve an appeal to spiritual phenomena or apparitions of whose credibility neither he himself nor any of his contemporaries, with the exception of Hobbes, had any doubt. He deals chiefly with this sort of evidence in his antidote, but it reappears in the essay on immortality as well as in the metaphysics, and was evidently a real source of his belief in spiritual facts. It seems rather to have gained than lost hold upon his mind as he advanced in years, for in the essay on immortality he distinguishes the preeminence of arguments drawn from reason above those from story, while in his later correspondence with Glanville he is enthusiastic in his defense of witches and ghosts as evidences of a spiritual world. Such evidences seem to have been specially vouchsafed for the confutation of Hobbians, Spinozians and the rest of that rabble in order, quote, that their dull souls, so inclinable to conceit, may be rubbed and awakened with a suspicion, at least if not assurance, that there are other intelligent beings besides these that are clad in heavy earth and clay, close quote. Let the small philosophics or foppling of this present age, he adds, deride them as much as they will. Those who are at pains to collect, quote, well-attested stories of witches and apparitions do real service to true religion and sound philosophy, and the most effectual and accommodate service to the confounding of infidelity and atheism, even in the judgment of the atheists themselves, who are as much afraid of the truth of these stories as an ape is of a whip, close quote. Something of the sharpness and satiricalness of this letter and postscript may be due to the confidence of correspondence with a sympathetic friend, but there is reason to think that it expresses the normal attitude of Moore's mind on this subject. So little had his philosophic and scientific studies given him any real or clear idea of the nature of evidence, or his own enlargement of Christian thought enabled him to understand the motives of those who differed with him beyond a certain point, or professed opinions more advanced than his own. It is unnecessary to dwell upon the special arguments by which he aims to prove the existence of a soul in man distinct from his body. They present nothing of novelty or particular interest. The facts of perception or an ideal element in knowledge and of free will are his two main proofs of an immaterial principle. He argues both points at length, chiefly against Hobbes, but keeping Descartes also in view, and particularly his well-known theory of the Canarian or Peneligland being the seat of the thinking principle. This theory has to him a suspicion of materialism, not with standing Descartes' strong affirmation of a rational soul or independent spiritual faculty. He supposes it to imply that the business of knowledge may be actively transacted betwixt this central seat and the animal spirits and organs of the body as its ministers or messengers, and is at pains to prove from Descartes' own description that this cannot be without the intervention of a soul, which is no more than what the author of the theory himself distinctly maintains. In the end he admits that there is much to be said for the Cartesian opinion, but upon the whole, for himself, inclines to place the seat of the soul in the fourth ventricle of the brain, as being in the most direct and happy communication with the animal spirits, which are the soul's immediate organs for sense and emotion. If therefore there be any place where these spirits are in the fittest plenty and purity, and in the most convenient situation for animal functions, that in all reason must be concluded the chief seat and acropolis of the soul. Now the spirits in the middle ventricle of the brain are not so indifferently situated for both the body and the head, as those in the fourth are, nor so pure. The two upper ventricles are also described as comparatively unfit for the function. So it is manifest that the fittest situation of the spirits being in the fourth ventricle, this must be considered as the center of perception and the common sensorium of the soul. Footnote. Professor Huxley, speaking of Descartes' hypothesis, observes, quote, modern physiologists do not ascribe so exalted a function to the little pineal gland, but in a vague sort of way they adopt Descartes' principle and suppose that the soul is lodged in the cortical part of the brain. At least, this is commonly regarded as the seat and instrument of consciousness, close quote. Lay sermons, page 370. End of footnote. C. But it was by no means enough for more to vindicate to his own satisfaction the existence of spiritual substance or of a soul in man. His philosophic imaginativeness pursued the subject far beyond the bounds of rational inference or even rational conjecture. The nature of soul, whence it comes and in what form it survives its departure from the body, are copiously and tediously discussed. The very obscurity of such questions has a charm for his quaint and dreamy thoughtfulness which delighted in the fantasies of its own musing. He struck into this dim region in his early poems and it never ceased to allure him. One of these poems, for example, is on the pre-existency of the soul and in his essay on immortality, he recurs to this hypothesis as more agreeable to reason than any other hypothesis whatever. It is necessary for him to have some theory of the production of the soul. It must come extraduce or be created on occasion or emerge from a previous state of being. And of all these theories, the last seems to him the only one consistent with the real nature and dignity of the soul and the majesty of the divine action in the process. His arguments are of a singular character and will hardly bear to be repeated. In a strict sense it is needless to say that they are not arguments at all. His mind makes no advance in the subject from the early poem which condenses his dreams in more fitting and fresher shape than the essay. If such a subject is to be handled at all, a platonical song is the most appropriate vehicle, and the reveries of the singer may interest or amuse when the reasonings of the essayist weary and repel. I would sing he begins, quote, the pre-existency of human souls and live once more again by recollection and quick memory all what is past since first we all began. But all too shallow be my wits to scan so deep a point and mind too dull to clear so dark a matter. But thou, O more than man, a reed then sacred bard of Plotin dear, tell what we mortals are, tell what of old we were. A spark or ray of the divinity clouded in earthly fogs eclad in clay, a precious drop sunk from eternity spilt on the ground or rather slunk away. For then we fell when we began first to tassay by stealth of our own selves something to bin, uncentring ourselves from our great stay which fondly we knew liberty did wean, and from that prank right jolly wights ourselves did deem, close quote. In this poem he not only sings the soul's pre-existency, but gives expression to all his notions subsequently developed in the essay on immortality of various vehicles of spiritual being. He could not any more than Cudworth conceive of spirit apart from body or expression. Even the divine spirit was to him race extensa, a supreme activity manifesting itself in space, and created spirits arranged themselves below the divine in a hierarchy of manifestation less tenuous and pure as they approached the earth. The Alexandrian mysticism had filtered something of the old Gnosticism into his speculations, and no doubt it is the very same difficulty over which Gnosticism pondered as to the connection betwixt heaven and earth, the divine and the human, which gives the cue to all more's philosophy. On the one hand, Habism seemed to him to cut away the upper, heavenly or divine sphere altogether, leaving nothing beyond the world of sense and utility. On the other hand Cartesianism drew a sharp and ineffacable line of distinction between spirit and matter, thought and extension. The two worlds appeared dissociated as bare mind and bare mechanism, a great chasm between without lines of intersection or points of fusion. Footnote, quote, it seems not so probable to me that nature admits of so great a chasm, close quote, immortality chapter 14. End of footnote. Both views were almost equally intolerable to his divinely intoxicated genius, which saw the spiritual everywhere and God's great fecundity filling all things, quote, stretching out himself in all degrees, his wisdom, goodness, and due equity are rightly ranked in all the soul them sees. O holy lamps of God, O sacred eyes, filled with love and wonder everywhere, ye wandering tapers to whom God describes his secret path, great psyche's darling dear, close quote. He imagined at least three definite stages of soul development or manifestation, ethereal, aerial, and terrestrial, quote, in every one whereof there may be several degrees of purity and impurity which yet need not amount to a new species, close quote. The myriad spirit world, undressed as yet, wait their time for generation fit and at length find habitation in an appropriate vehicle. In the poem the destiny of the soul is conceived as a descent, beginning with the, quote, celestial or fiery cloud, the orb of pure quick life and sense, which the thrice mighty mercury of yore ascending held with angels' conference, and of their comely shapes had perfect cognizance, sphere of pure sense which no professions curb, nor uncouth shape inspectors ever can disturb. Next this is that light vehicle of air, where likewise all sense is in each part pite. This is more gross, subject to grief and fear, and most what soiled with bodily delight, sometimes with vengeance, envy, anger, spite, this orb is ever passion in sensation. But the third wagon of the soul, that height the terrain vehicle beside this passion hath organized sense distinct by limitation. These last be but the soul's live sepulchres, where at least of all she acts, but afterward rose from this tomb, she free and lively fares and upward goes, if she be not debarred by too long bondage in this cave below, close, quote. In the essay he traverses the same round of speculation, but more from the conception of an ascending series of developments awaiting the human soul after death. There are very few that arrive at once at the celestial or ethereal vehicle, immediately upon their quitting the terrestrial one, that heavenly chariot necessarily carrying us in triumph to the greatest happiness the soul of man is capable of, which would arrive to all men indifferently, good and bad, if the parting with this earthly body would suddenly mount us into the heavenly. Wherefore, by a just nemesis, the souls of men that are not very heroically virtuous will find themselves restrained within the compass of this collisionous air, as both reason itself will suggest, and the Platonists have unanimously determined, close, quote. The duration of the souls abode in these various vehicles is very different, quote. The shortest of all is that of the terrestrial vehicle. In the aerial the soul may inhabit many ages, and in the ethereal forever, close, quote. To all this hierarchy of spiritual development, more of course adds on with Cudworth the idea of a spirit of nature, a dumb inarticulate spirit, quote, without sense and animate version, pervading the whole matter of the universe and exercising a plastic power therein, producing such phenomena as cannot be resolved into mere mechanical powers, close, quote. One of his main arguments for the existence of such a spirit, it is curious to notice, is the phenomenon of gravity. The law of gravity, it is to be remembered, was not yet discovered, and the descent of heavy bodies to the earth seemed to more only capable of explanation as the impulse of, quote, some immaterial cause, such as we call the spirit of nature, or inferior soul of the world, that must direct the motions of the ethereal particles to act upon those grosser bodies to drive them towards the earth, close, quote. The immediate corporeal cause, he agreed with Descartes, was the ethereal matter abounding in the air more than in grosser bodies. But as usual he super added a spiritual element to the Cartesian mechanics. He enters also into a long polemic with Hobbes on the subject, which is not only now without interest, but hardly intelligible. D. In turning finally to view more as a moralist, we emerge from the dim twilight of speculation in which we have been faintly following him. His endcoridium ethicum is perhaps the most compact, clear, and generally intelligible of all his works. It is moreover compendious and answers truly to its title of a manual. Somewhat singularly, considering this character and the definite outline of ethical doctrine which the treatise contains, it has passed comparatively out of sight. And while Cudworth always occupies a prominent position in a historical review of English moral philosophy, Moore is frequently omitted altogether. Macintosh, for example, makes no mention of Moore in his well-known dissertation. Neither does Professor Bain in his recent compendium of mental and moral science in which he gives a review of ethical systems, part two. He will, however, in his lectures on the history of moral philosophy in England, has noticed him with appreciation and given a brief summary of his ethical doctrine, lecture three. End of footnote. His ethics is almost as forgotten as his metaphysics, although in its day it passed into a second edition within two years. We have already explained the origin of Moore's ethics in connection with Cudworth's long-deferred labors on the same subject. The letter we then quoted, addressed to Worthington, sets all the circumstances before us, and he tells them over again very much in the same language in his preface to the manual. Friends important him very much in the years following the restoration to write a short ethics. The times seemed urgently to call for such a work. The spirit of inquiry everywhere awakened and searching as he says for the, quote, causes of all things would not rest short of right reason in this as in other matters, close quote. He was reluctant, however, to undertake the task on various accounts. He knew that his friend Dr. Cudworth had been long meditating and elaborate work on morals. He was absorbed in what appeared to him more agreeable and exciting studies, his speculations as to the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and especially he had no faith in making people virtuous by fine systems of morality. He emphasizes this latter reason particularly in his preface. Mere definitions and rules of moral philosophy, he says, have no force against vice and baseness. Vice can only be overcome by active virtue, and such virtue can only be taught by divine faith in God and his living word. He yielded, however, to the importunity of his friends, and once entered upon his task he pursued it not without pleasure. So far as Dr. Cudworth was concerned, he was led to believe that his own, being a small treatise running through the whole body of ethics, would not interfere with his larger design. There is, in fact, little, if any, resemblance betwixt Moore's treatise and Cudworth's. The latter is devoted to a special point of great importance, the essence or radical character of morality. The former is really, as it professes to be, an ethical manual. It is composed in Latin. It runs through the whole subject and treats of it briefly but comprehensively in three divisions or books. In the first, the author discusses the general question of ethics and explains the nature of the ethical life or virtue, its conditions and instruments. In the second, he gives a very arbitrary but elaborate classification of the virtues or the principal elements of morality. And in the third book, after a defense of free will as the essential condition of all morality, he treats especially of the ethical art or the means of acquiring virtue. In direct contrast to Cudworth, he views the subject from the beginning mainly in its practical or useful aspect and defines morality not so much in itself as in its end. It is, he says in his opening sentence, the art of living well and happily. Goodness and happiness are to him identical, merely different aspects of the highest law of our being or what the ancient moralists spoke of as the summum bonum. Beatitude, therefore, is the same as morality or the ethical life. It is the distinguishing quality or definition of this life. And in what is it found? What are its conditions and instruments? It is not found in the intellect and does not peculiarly belong to it as its property, in this respect also differing from Cudworth who makes good and evil justice and injustice intuitions of the pure reason. The special seat of morality is in a certain bona-form faculty by which we instinctively and absolutely deem what is best and delight in it alone. It is the mind, not in the mere exercise of reason, but acting ex censu vertutis which brings us within the moral sphere. This is the highest and truly divine side of our being corresponding to To Agathon in the Platonic deity. It is the side moreover which may be cultivated by all men. For all men are capable of the love of God and their neighbors and this divine love is the highest form and best fruit of the bona-form faculty. At the same time the intellectual and the divine are never to be separated. Morality is always agreeable to right reason and in its nature, essence and verity comes within its cognizance. Only it requires something more than reason, a certain divine instinct or special faculty of good to apprehend it in life and realize it. Quote, to estimate the fruit of virtue by that imaginary knowledge of it which is acquired by mere definition is very much the same as if one were to estimate the nature of fire from a fire painted on the wall which has no power whatever to keep off the winter's cold. Every vital good is perceived and judged by life and sense. True virtue is a certain intimate life, not any external form visible to the outward eyes. If you have ever been this you have seen this. Close quote. This which he quotes from Plotinus he appropriates as the secret of all true moral science. Such being the nature and conditions of virtue, the crown and summit of our practical life, the passions are to be regarded as its ministers or instruments. They are not evil in themselves but only in their abuse. The beneficent purpose of divine providence being no less clearly shown in them than in our bodily organs. In this respect he signalizes his opposition to the Stoics. By a passion he means any impression of sense affecting the mind and influencing its judgment or any idiosyncrasy of constitution or education. All such impulses are strictly natural and therefore part of the human order to be controlled and regulated and not extirpated. He compares them to the winds in the external world which purify the air and prevent stagnation. So the passions stir our blood and stimulate the moral system by which it gains larger experience and a higher degree of happiness which in Moore's conception is equivalent to an increase of moral power. The plastic nature of which the heart is the center is the seat of the passions. The perceptive nature with the brain as its chief organ being the seat of the reason. And while both enter equally into the human constitution it is yet the business of the higher to control the lower. In other words human life is a constitution, order, or polity in which the mind or reason does not stand alone but surrounded by its ministers whom it ought to govern. It ought to dominate not only the passions but the spirit of nature to overcome whose enchantments it requires to be enforced by divine aid. In his enumeration of the passions Moore professes to follow Descartes closely. According to the French philosopher there are only six primitive passions, viz admiration, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. All the others are composed from these or are species under these genera. Our moralist thinks that they may be reduced to the three first for what he asks is desire but love turned towards a future good and what joy but love exalting in the beloved presence of good and what sadness except hatred enfolded and oppressed by present evil. He then arranges them in several classes. Admirations stands by itself as a passion of the first class. Love and hatred are of the second. Desire in its various manifestations forms the third and joy and sadness although only modifications of love and hatred make a fourth and final class. He treats of them in succession and their functions and uses. Many of his observations are highly pertinent and interesting and anticipate some of the results of later analysis in a very different school from his own. He points out for example the distinction betwixt glory and shame how the former stimulates our higher nature and the latter checks our lower. Anger is a conspicuous part of retributive justice and by no means to be confounded with hatred. All the family of irascible passions, the mouillés, are highly useful and necessary since it concerns us more to drive away evil than to rejoice in superfluous good. Quoting from an ancient author he represents desire as the purveyor and resentment as the soldier of the moral state. In this idea or picture of a moral constitution in man it is difficult to say whether Moore had any reference to Hobbes. He mentions him only once which is all the more remarkable since he quotes so frequently from Descartes and the ancient moralists. Footnote of ancient authorities he quotes especially Aristotle, both the Magna Moralia and the Nicomachean Ethics, the Neoplatonists, Cicero, the Tusculin Questions, and Marcus Antoninus. End footnote. His conception of human nature is clearly marked off from that of his great contemporary. With certain affinities not to be found in Cudworth arising out of a more living and comprehensive view of all the facts his discrepancy of doctrine is equally radical. Hobbes' analysis, interesting as it is in many of its details, nowhere rises to a similar unity of conception. The individual man remains a mere conjuries of instinctive and clashing appetites till he is brought within the control of the body politic and so reduced to a moral condition. With Moore on the other hand, no less than with Cudworth, the distinctive or supreme aspect of human nature is divine, and all appetites and passions, while no less really parts of nature with their due offices and objects, yet fall into proper subordination to the higher divine faculty or reason which distinguishes man and stamps him a moral being. The remaining books of Moore's ethics are less important and may be hastily summarized. Having treated a virtue in Gennari, he devotes the second book to the virtues in Speciet. His classification of virtues we have already said is very arbitrary. In place of the four cardinal virtues of the ancients, wisdom, courage, justice, temperance, he enumerates only three, corresponding to the three primitive passions, vis, prudence, sincerity, and patience. Prudence answers to admiration, sincerity to desire, and patience to resentment. Footnote. He here changes his nomenclature and even somewhat his analysis of the primitive passions. And a footnote. Justice, courage, and temperance are reckoned next in order as the three principle derivative virtues, while justice again is subdivided into piety and probity. There are various subordinate virtues enumerated and described, such as liberality, gratitude, veracity, candor, urbanity, fidelity. And a chapter is devoted to the discussion of the Aristotelic mean, chapter nine. Finally he sums up all virtue in intellectual love, which he interprets to be love of the highest good. This is the highest name and true measure of all morality. All special virtues spring from this and may be resolved into it. Just as numbers spring from unity and may be measured by it, so intellectual love, as a simple and single principle, is the source and rule of all diverse forms of good. The third book contains an excellent defense of free will as the basis of morality. Against the theological necessitarians who deny contingency, Moore argues clearly that God himself can alone know what events are necessary and what contingent. Pressions of such events either implies a contradiction or not, but to suppose a contradiction is virtually to say that the pressions is not divine. Contradictory objects cannot come within the sphere of the divine omniscience. And if there is no contradiction, we may recognize in this very fact that there is no inconsistency betwixt the divine pressions and free will. Either way, no solid argument can be drawn against moral liberty from the idea of divine pressions. Again, the whole force of the objections as to the will always following what appears for the moment best, Moore supposes to be met by the simple experience that the good we know we frequently do not do. Our works are not determined by our knowledge of what is best. We may have fine ideas of virtue and yet never put them in practice. Our freedom in this sense is only too real, and it is the very object of morality to bring the idea and the will into unison, and so enlighten the one and discipline the other that they may attain to the highest good. The character of Moore's genius and thought has been sufficiently set before our readers. As a thinker, he is much less systematic, but more fertile and genial than Cudworth. He is poet, moralist, and mystic rather than thinker. It is difficult to bring his varied speculations to a unity or to fix his opinions into a definite system. His attitude is sufficiently determinate, but his sympathies and views are apt to vary with his temporary enthousiasms and the altered pressure of the moral and theological atmosphere around him. He is never inconsistent with himself, whether commending Descartes or abusing him, whether warning Lady Conway against the Quakers and exposing their fanaticism or transported by the wonder working vagaries of Van Helmont or the ghost stories of Glanville. But his genius is rich, complex, and enthusiastic, swayed by passionate and lofty emotion rather than clear, penetrating, and illumined by a definitely rational purpose. He is less philosopher or theologian than prophet and gnostic, with his mind brimful of divine ideas in the delighted contemplation of which he lives and moves and writes. All his works are inspired by a desire to make known something that he himself has felt of the divine. The invisible or celestial, so far from being hard for him to apprehend, is his familiar haunt. He has difficulty in letting himself down from the higher region of supernal realities to the things of earth. This celestial elevation is the most marked feature at once of his character and his mind. It is the key to his beautiful serenity and singular spiritual complacency. A complacency never offensive, yet raising him somewhat above common sympathy. It is the source of the dreamy imaginings and vague aerial conjectures which fill his books. These may seem to us now poor and unreal, and some of them absurd, but they were to him living and substantial. Nay, they were the life and substance of all his thought. He felt himself at home, moving in the heavenly places and discoursing of things which it hath not entered into the ordinary mind to conceive or utter. He was a spiritual realist. It was his passion and study so to feel and describe divine facts that others might see and know them as he himself did. Thus it was that he delighted to dwell on such subjects as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and felt that when he was drawn aside from these, even to ethical questions and rules, he was drawn from a pleasant and congenial atmosphere to a dry and uninviting one. The substantive value of Moore's thought cannot be judged high. It is impossible indeed to overestimate the tone, character, and spiritual ideal after which he aimed in all his life and work, but so far as the progress of truth is concerned, the removal of prejudice, the simplification of belief, the conciliation of natural and spiritual knowledge, he accomplished little. With all his enthusiasm of reason, he is an imperfect representative of the rational movement. The Cambridge philosophy, while it showed in him some of its finest fruit, yet also brought forth in him all its weakness. The Neoplatonic extravagances which lay hidden in it from the first came in his writings into luxurious blossom. Originally a protest against spiritual fanaticism, no less than dogmatic bigotry, it remained free in all its course from any taint of the latter, but it certainly reached in Moore a new species of fanaticism. He is not merely inspired but possessed by his favorite ideas. They not only guide but dominate him and sometimes in the most traditionary and outworn forms. They are never kept calmly before him in an attitude of inquiry. His aim is not to purify enlarge and harmonize them but to teach them even in exaggerated and fantastic forms. All this bespeaks the decadence rather than the growth of reason. With all, Moore is true to the two springs of the movement. He loves inquiry, although he is himself an imperfect inquirer. He never shrinks from reason if he fails to give it free play and scope and to draw it into the full light of day. Again he believes profoundly in the harmony of natural and spiritual truth. He has lost the threads of this harmony and some of his own speculations have rather tended to obscure than to illuminate it. But if he must be pronounced in many things a spiritual dreamer rather than a Christian rationalist, his dreams are not merely of a higher world fashioned by his own imaginings but of a cosmos of nature and spirit, of life here and life hereafter united by continuity of effort and the beneficent designs of divine love. End of chapter 5 part 5 Section 20 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy Volume 2 by John Tullock This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 6 Minor members of the Cambridge School Part 1 There are several less important members of the Cambridge Fraternity who deserve commemoration. With one exception none of them can be said to have enriched or modified the impulse of thought in which they shared while the most prominent belong in their full ecclesiastical and theological activity to the new political type of Latitudinarianism which came into vogue at the Revolution to which our historical survey in these volumes is not designed to extend. Yet we must glance at several names intimately connected with the great teachers whose labors we have been reviewing without some notice of whom the picture of the Cambridge School in its full characteristics would remain imperfect. Most of these names have already been mentioned in our pages and their literary and personal connections in some degree indicated. Worthington, Rust, Fowler, and Patrick, for example, have come before us more than once. They were all Cambridge men and more or less satellites of the party. Some of them bore to its chief members very definite and special relations. We shall sketch their position and relations somewhat more fully and fill in such particulars regarding them as may seem significant. None of those now mentioned save Patrick have left writings which give them any prominent distinction in English theological literature and their personality has barely lifted them above the obscurity which so rapidly overtakes inferior workers in every intellectual department. There is one name, however, hitherto little mentioned in our pages which claims attention before any of these, that of Nathaniel Culverwell, author of a discourse on the light of nature. Culverwell came forth from the bosom of the school and was in some respects one of its most remarkable products. Both chronologically and in point of intellectual significance he deserves to stand at the head of our subordinate list. The discourse of the light of nature appeared in 1652 and in genius and wealth of thought it claims the very highest rank. It is, moreover, a distinct variety in the literature of the school one of its most characteristic manifestations and yet discrepant from its special theology. Not even John Smith's discourses are more instinct with a lofty ideality and all the glow and beauty of a luminous yet impassioned imagination. Few writings of any age show a rarer and finer spiritual insight or team with fruits of a more largely developed thoughtfulness. It is almost a poem in its grandeur and harmony of conception and the lyrical enthusiasm with which it chants the praises of reason. And yet Culverwell was a Calvinist and the first edition of his discourse bears the imprimatur of Edward Calomy and was dedicated to Wichcote's puritan correspondent and critic, Anthony Tuckney. This gives a peculiar interest to his connection with the school and reveals in a striking light the strength of its influence in those early years when Wichcote was in his full activity as a preacher and the fresh life of his sermons was moving many minds. It is hardly possible to avoid the suspicion that Culverwell was in Tuckney's view in some of the allusions which he makes in his letters to the effects of Wichcote's teaching on the young ones of the university. Footnote. This conjecture has occurred to the modern editor of Culverwell's discourse, the late Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, to whose careful and loving appreciation we owe the beautiful edition which appeared from the press of the Messers Constable in 1857. The result is that Culverwell alone of all the Cambridge Divines may be said to be critically edited and so to survive in a form suited to the modern reader. It is seldom that editorial work is done so well as by Dr. Brown in this case, so fully and yet so concisely with so much real learning and yet so little pedantry. End of footnote. The youthful genius who had celebrated reason in his discourse in such felicitous and glowing language had just closed his brief career when these letters were written. Of Culverwell, even more truly than of John Smith, there is no biography. His name is not even found in any biographical dictionary. Footnote. Not even in Philip's recent dictionary of biographical reference, which is very elaborate and contains some names twice over, London, 1871. This fact is noted by Dr. Brown. End of footnote. The year of his birth is unknown and his parentage is uncertain. There seems little doubt, however, that he was descended from a race of Culverwells who, in the beginning of the century and even before, were noted for their Puritanism. Probably he was the son or nephew of Ezekiel Culverwell, rector of a parish in Essex and author of a popular treatise on faith published in 1623. A friend of the well-known Dr. Sibbs who edited a small volume by him after his death and describes him as a man very well experienced in all the ways of God. Nathaniel was sent to Emmanuel College in 1633. He has entered in that year as a pensioner. Wichcote was then a fellow of the college and John Smith began his studies three years later. He graduated as master in 1640, the same year in which Smith took his bachelor's degree. He afterwards became a fellow and for some time before his death was a regular preacher in the college chapel. He was, therefore, in the very center of the platonic movement in its earlier form. He must have heard Wichcote often preach, probably those very sermons complained of by Tuckney in which reason was so much cried up. John Smith and he could hardly fail being friends with so much in common. Their very differences may have been a source of mutual interest, for there seems no doubt of Culverwell's hearty Puritanism. In one of his smaller pieces he speaks of the public men of the time in the usual Puritan style as Zaruba Bells and Jehoshua's Building God at Temple. Footnote. Mount Ebal, originally published as well as some other minor pieces along with The Light of Nature. End of footnote. In the discourse, however, little remains of his Puritan Calvinism save its distilled and finer essence of spiritual rapture. A few traces of dogmatic narrowness are manifest here and there, but never in a harsh form. The date of Culverwell's death, as of his birth, is unknown. It probably took place about a year before the publication of the discourse and in circumstances of deep affliction of some kind or another. The hints which are conveyed in his brother's address to the reader seem to point to something of the nature of mental aberration during which the youthful genius had exposed himself to the criticism of his friends, quote, as one whose eyes were lofty and whose eyelids lifted up, who bear himself too high upon a conceit of his parts, although they that knew him intimately are most willing to be his compurgators in this particular. Close, quote. The original editor of the discourse seems to indicate something of the same kind in acknowledging Tuckney's kindness to the author, especially when he lay under the discipline of so sad a providence. Footnote. A doctor Dillingham, of whom little seems known, except that he succeeded Tuckney in the Mastership of Emmanuel College and is supposed to have translated into Latin the Westminster Confession and Catechisms. End of footnote. A mind so finely strong as that of Culverwell, so soaring and passionate in its yearnings after truth, and so susceptible to all influences of life and nature, can readily be supposed to have lost its balance and in the very sublimity of its aspirations to have gone astray. It is barely possible also that some conflict arising out of his peculiar religious position may have plunged him into perplexity and helped to unsettle his thoughts, although there is no evidence of this in the discourse itself. It is singularly radiant and hopeful in its religious confidence. The original editor says of the discourse of the light of nature that its, quote, design was on the one hand to vindicate the use of reason in matters of religion from the aspersions and prejudices of some weaker ones in those times, who, having entertained erroneous opinions which they were in no way able to defend, were taught by their more cunning seducers to wink hard and accept against all offensive weapons. So, on the other hand, to chastise the sauciness of Sosinus and his followers who dare set Hagar above her mistress and make faith wait at the elbow of corrupt and distorted reason. Close quote. As it stands, the use of reason and the special nobility of its function in the search after truth form its main theme. The conciliation of reason and faith in refutation of the Sosinians and all who disparage the mysteries of the Gospel was to form the second and more important part of the treatise which the author did not live to complete. This is to be borne in mind in judging of his opinions. He stands in the midst between two adversaries of extreme persuasions and while he opposes the one he seems to favour the other more than his meat. But Judge Candidly says the editor, quote, and take his opinion as thou wouldst do his picture sitting, not from a luxuriant expression wherein he always allowed for the shrinking but from his declared judgment when he speaks professedly of such a subject. Close quote. The author himself announces in the porch or introduction to his discourse that his ultimate aim was the reconciliation of faith and of reason, quote, to give unto reason the things that are reasons and unto faith the things that are faiths, to give faith her full scope and latitude and to give reason also her just bounds and limits. Close quote. He then launches into a high toned comparison of the two which gradually passes into an eloquent defensive reason from the aspersions which some had cast upon her. Quote. This reason is the first born but the other has the blessing. There is a twin light springing from both and they both spring from the same fountain of light and they both severally conspire in the same end. The glory of that being from which they shine and the welfare and happiness of that being upon which they shine. To blaspheme reason is to reproach heaven itself and to dishonor the God of reason to question the beauty of his image, close quote. Some, however, are so strangely prejudiced that the very name of reason especially in a pulpit must needs have at least a thousand heresies couched in it. What would these men have? he exclaims, quote. Would they be banished from their own essences? Would they forfeit and renounce their understandings? Or have they any to forfeit or disclaim? Would they put out the candle of the Lord, intellectuals of his own lighting? Or have they any to put out? Would they creep into some lower species and go aggrazing with Nebuchadnezzar among the beasts of the field? Or are they not there already? Oh, what hard thoughts have these men of religion? Do they look upon it only as a bird of prey that comes to peck out the eyes of men? Close quote. He admits that the eye of reason is weakened, but then this is no reason for plucking it out. Leah is not to be hated merely, quote, because she is bleer-eyed. Is it not better to enjoy the faint and languishing light of this candle of the Lord than to be impalpable and disconsolate darkness? There are indeed but a few seminal sparks left in the ashes, and must there be whole floods of water cast upon them to quench them? It is but an old imperfect manuscript, with some broken periods, some letters worn out. Must they therefore, with an unmerciful indignation, rend it and tear it asunder? Close quote. It is granted that, quote, the picture has lost its gloss and beauty, the oriancy of its colors, the elegancy of its lineaments, the comeliness of its proportions. Must it therefore be totally defaced? Must it be made one great blot, and must the very frame of it be broken in pieces? Close quote. Reason, moreover, is conscious of her deficiencies. The very apprehension of her weakness comes from herself. Quote. When awakened, she feels her own wounds, bears her own jarrings, sees the dimness of her own sight. Reason herself has made many sad complaints unto you. She has told you often, and that with tears in her eyes, what a great shipwreck she has suffered, what goods she has lost, how hardly she escaped with a poor decayed being. She has shown you often some broken relics as the sad remembrance of her former riches. She had nothing but two or three jewels about her, two or three common notions, and would you rob her of them also? Close quote. Or is reason offensive because she cannot grasp and comprehend the things of God? Quote. Vain men, will they pluck out their eyes because they cannot look upon the sun in his brightness and glory? What though reason cannot enter the holy of holies and pierce within the veil? May it not, notwithstanding, be as the porch at the gate of the temple called beautiful and be a doorkeeper in the house of God? Close quote. Reason has been accused of wrangling against the mysteries of salvation. But it is not right but distorted reason that ever does this. Nor is it a valid objection that errors are sometimes introduced under the fair disguise of so beautiful a name and have some tincture of reason in them. It is becoming to put a good face on things and everything insofar as it is really rational is good. Even error is better with some tincture of reason than without it. He acknowledges at the same time its abuse in commending what he thinks erroneous. Quote. Thus, Arminianism pleads for itself under the specious notion of God's love to mankind. Thus, that silly error of antinomianism will need style itself an evangelical honeycomb. Close quote. Finally, reason is the best help for disentangling all difficulties. It prepares and fortifies the mind against deception by the very fact that it reveals its liability to go astray. Some men's reason is not so well advanced and improved as it might be. Quote. A sharper edge would quickly cut such difficulties asunder. Some have more defined and clarified intellectuals, more vigorous and sparkling eyes than others, and one soul differs from another in glory, and that reason which can make some shift to maintain error might with a great deal less sweat and pains maintain a truth. Close quote. Culverwell employs himself in his second chapter in explaining the phrase the candle of the Lord, which he has already used as identical with reason. Footnote. Proverbs 20-27. Quote. The spirit of man is the candle of the Lord. Close quote. Etc. End of footnote. He does this in a manner to suggest that the discourse was originally delivered from the pulpit, and it is curious to reflect how the text of Proverbs containing this phrase was bandied about betwixt the disputants of the period. Tuckney accuses which quote of overfrequently quoting it, and the true meaning and application of it are among the subjects debated in their letters. Culverwell is more ingenious than satisfactory in some of his comments, but he deduces fairly enough that the proper and genuine meaning of the phrase is, quote, that God hath breathed into all the sons of men reasonable souls, which may serve as so many candles to enlighten and direct them in the searching out their creator, in the discovering of other inferior beings and themselves also. Close quote. In short, he finds in the words a brief commendation of natural light or the light of reason, and then with the view of further clearing and entering upon his subject he proceeds to inquire, one, what nature is, two, what the law of nature is, three, what the light of nature is. These inquiries occupy him in the remainder of the treatise, and although here and there his style is ornate to a fault and the tone of the pulpit lingers in reiterative and imaginative emphasis, which occasionally blurs rather than brightens his meaning, it is impossible not to be struck with the range of knowledge and wide capacity of thought as well as richness of illustration which it everywhere displays. Not to speak of the philosophers of antiquity who were the natural textbooks of the school he deals familiarly with all the great writers of the time, Bacon and Descartes, Hobbes had scarcely yet emerged, Selden, Grosius, and Salmatius, and amongst smaller philosophers Sir Kennell Digby and Lord Brooke. Footnote Robert Greville, Lord Brooke, eulogized by Milton in his Areopagitica, and author of a treatise on the nature of truth, its union and unity with the soul, etc., London, 1641. And a footnote. He is especially just to the speculations of Soares and Lord Herbert in the preceding age and finds in the latter a distinct support for his own theory of knowledge as involving both elements of thought and sensational experience. While contending strongly for the subjective side of knowledge, quote, some clear and indelible principles, some first and alphabetical notions stamped and printed upon the being of man, close, quote, he yet opposes what he believes to be the extreme platonic doctrine of the soul's originating knowledge of itself and communicating independently its own light to the objects of experience. The whole theory of pre-existence which proved such a snare to the mind of Moore and others of the school is set aside by him as irrational. Plato, quote, might as well fancy such implanted ideas, such seeds of light in his external eye as such seminal principles in the eye of the mind, close, quote. The Platonists were right in exalting reason and looking upon the spirit of a man as the candle of the Lord, but they were deceived in the time when it was lighted. Man has only to reflect to be convinced that he brings no conate ideas as Culverwell calls them into the world with him. Quote, Do but analyze your own thoughts. Do but consult with your own breasts. Tell us whence it was that the light first sprang in upon you. Had you such notions as these when you first passed into being? Had you these conate ideas in the cradle? And were they rocked asleep with you? Or did you then meditate upon these principles? The whole is greater than the part, and nothing can be and not be at the same time. Never tell us that you wanted organical dispositions, for you plainly have recourse to the sensitive powers, and must needs subscribe to this, that all knowledge comes flourishing in at these lattices. In short, the capacity or faculty of knowledge is from within, the content of it from without. We have no innate or conate ideas, but ideas are born of our original powers. Quote, The beginning of the soul's strength espoused to their virgin objects, closing and complying with them long before discourse, reasoning, can reach them, nay, with such objects as discourse cannot reach at all. We have been led into this explanation of Calverwell's general position as a thinker, in connection with what he says of Lord Herbert, whose views he is setting forth with sympathy and approval in the last quotation. His theory of knowledge is intimately connected with his special argument. Nature is to him a great order, embracing the spiritual and material. The law of nature is the reflection of the eternal law, which is nothing else than God himself, and reason is at once the light which discerns the law and the subject which obeys it. There is some indistinctness in the sequence of his thoughts, but his views in detail are clear and admirable. Nothing can be finer than his vindication of the true meaning both of nature and of law, in contradistinction to the current modern perversion of both these words. Why bodies only, he says, quote, should engross and monopolize natural philosophy, and why a soul cannot be admitted into it, unless it bring a certificate in common damas from the body, is a thing altogether unaccountable, unless it be resolved into a mere arbitrary determination and a philosophical kind of tyranny. Herein Plato was defective, that he did not correct and reform the abuse of this word nature, that he did not screw it up to a higher and more spiritual notion. For it is very agreeable to the eternal and supremist being. Nature is that regular line which the wisdom of God himself has drawn in being. Close quote. Law again he defines as characteristically moral in its essence. We may speak of God setting a law to the winds and the waves, but such things are at the most, but tendencies and gravitations and not, quote, the fruits of a legislative power. A rational creature only is capable of law, which is a moral restraint and so cannot reach to those things which are necessitated. Close quote. It is necessary in order to constitute a law that it not only flow forth and express the divine being, but that it be clearly promulgated by the divine will. There must be the voice of the trumpet. Law is for a public good and it must be made known in a public manner. Quote. Law is founded on the intellectuals, on the reason, not on the sensitive principle. It supposes a noble and freeborn creature for where there is no liberty there is no law. A law being nothing else than a rational restraint and limitation of absolute liberty. Now all liberty is radically in the intellect and such creatures as have no light have no choice, no moral variety. Close quote. Mere sensitive creatures are absolute antinomians. Quote. The law of nature is hatched by reason from those first and oval principles of her own laying, scattered in the soul and filling it with a vigorous pregnancy, a multiplying fruitfulness so that it brings forth a numerous and sparkling posterity of secondary notions. Close quote. As specimens of these first principles he gives the following. We must seek good and avoid evil. We must seek happiness. He quotes with approval the saying of Bacon, all morality is nothing but a collection and bundling up of natural precepts. The moralists but enlarge the fringe of nature's garment. They are so many commentators and expositors upon nature's law. It is reason alone as an intellectual lamp in the soul which discovers and verifies this law. Nowhere does Culverwell show higher sense and penetration than in dealing with this part of his subject. He ridicules the idea of the Jews being the source of all moral and spiritual knowledge with evident reference to the prevalent delusion of the Cambridge School. Quote. Some say Pythagoras lighted his candle there at the Jew's son and Plato also his. Why, did they borrow common notions of them? Was this written law? Only some Jewish manuscript which they translated into Greek. Can Pythagoras know nothing unless a Jew's soul come and inform him? If they will but attend unto Pythagoras himself, they shall hear him resolving these first notions of his and others into nature's bounty and not into the Jew's courtesy. This indeed must be granted, he adds, that the whole generality of the heathen went a gleaning in the Jewish fields. They had some of their grapes, some ears of corn that dropped from them. Yet given to the Jew the things of the Jews and to the Gentile the things of the Gentiles and that which God had made common call not thou peculiar. The Apostles question is here very reasonable. Is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also. Close quote. While reason is the chief voice of nature's law, the consent of nations in a secondary way contributes no small light to its manifestation. General results can only come from some common cause. Quote. When you see so many rays of the same light shooting themselves into the several corners of the world, you presently look up to the sun as the glorious original of them all. As face answers to face, so does the heart of one man the heart of another. Even the heart of an Athenian the heart of an Indian. Close quote. Instead of arguing, like Locke, that the diversity of moral practice in the world is inconsistent with any radical or innate moral truth, Culverwell draws the strongest evidence of the universality of certain common notions or principles of material law from the affinities which subsist among men, notwithstanding all their differences. Quote. Certainly it is some transcendent beauty that so many nations are enamored with all. It is some powerful music that sets the whole world a dancing. Look upon the diversities of nations and there you will see a rough and barbarous Scythian, a wild American, an unpolished Indian, a superstitious Egyptian, a subtle Ethiopian, a cunning Arabian, a luxurious Persian, a treacherous Carthaginian, a lying Cretian, an elegant Athenian, a wanton Corinthian, a desperate Italian, a fighting German. And tell me whether it must not be some admirable and efficacious truth that shall so overpower them all as to pass current amongst them and be owned and acknowledged by them. Close quote. Having thus explained the questions opened by him, Culverwell launches into a panagerical description of reason as a derivative light, a diminutive light, a certain light, as a light directive, calm and peaceable, pleasant, and finally ascendant, filling the remaining chapters of the treatise. It is unnecessary and beyond our space to follow further his eloquent analysis. Everywhere there is the impress of a full and teaming mind overflowing in its wealth of thought and expression. A mind sometimes too intense and narrow in its judgments in obedience to early prejudices and training, yet genial even in its narrowness and far more vivid, rapid, glowing, and poetic in its movements than any other mind of the school. Footnote. As in his judgment of Pelagianism and Arminianism, and his view of the fate of the wise and good among the heathen, modified as it is, page 270. And a footnote. Smith is, upon the whole, more profound in insight. His vision ranges over a larger area of spiritual contemplation, but even he hardly equals Culverwell in exuberance of genius and flow and fertility of imaginative thoughtfulness. After Culverwell, John Worthington deserves the first place on our list. His name has been frequently before us in the course of our survey. He was the original editor of Smith's Select Discourses and his diary and correspondence gives us glimpses into the interior life of the school of which we have already so far availed ourselves. Footnote. Worthington's diary and correspondence were edited for the Chatham Society, Manchester in 1847 by James Crossley, Esquire, to whose careful and interesting labours we have already referred. End of footnote. They are hardly as full and interesting as might have been expected, but they help now and then to light up the picture, heavy in its theological drapery with a bright and homely touch. Besides being the editor of Smith's Discourses, Worthington was the correspondent and enthusiastic admirer of both Cudworth and Moore. He is known himself by a volume of Discourses first published by his son in 1725 and since republished and also by a smaller volume of miscellanies which appeared earlier in 1704. He was a native of Manchester and educated at Emmanuel College where Wichcote and Cudworth had preceded him and which Smith probably entered about the same time. He was chosen master of Jesus College during the Commonwealth but resigned after the restoration in favour of Dr. Richard Stern who had been ejected by the Puritan authorities. Stern subsequently became Archbishop of York. After 1660 Worthington appears to have withdrawn from Cambridge and exclusively devoted himself to the labours of a clergyman in a succession of livings. Horton, Fenditten, Ingoldsby, to which he was presented by Moore in whose gift it was and finally Hackney of which church he was chosen lecturer in 1670. He was a diligent correspondent not only with his Cambridge friends but with Mr. Samuel Hartlib whom some of our readers may remember in connection with Milton. Hartlib, like Evelyn, Jeremy Taylor's friend, is a figure constantly flitting through the theological and literary society of the 17th century. He was a writer and great authority on agriculture as Evelyn was on gardening and forestry. Deeply interested in the philosophical and religious questions of the time and an ardent educational reformer which is his point of connection with Milton, he was eager to learn all that was going on the new books appearing or the new speculations afloat. Worthington's correspondence with him is of course chiefly on religious subjects but the letters are full of literary and social as well as theological gossip. Moore is frequently mentioned with great respect and his mystery of godliness spoken of as a book the like of which hath not yet appeared in the world. The appearance of Glanville's vanity of dogmatizing is signalized in May 1661 and the author spoken of as a young man of much reading and promise, quote, abating some juvenile heat. As one said of the parts of pregnant young men, we may guess what the wine will be and it will taste better when broached some years hence, close quote. It may be doubted in this case whether the new wine was not better than the more mature. Worthington's own writings do not possess much substance. The volume of discourses is the more readable of the two and the style occasionally rises to dignity and acquaint plaintive eloquence studded with many a golden sentence from the favorite Neoplatonic mint. Speaking of the necessity of inward purity in order to see God, now he says it is when the soul has set itself in good earnest on the task of self-purification, quote, that the locks of Samson grow again and the strength which went away and was gone by its yielding to the blandishments and softnesses of the sensual and animal life, that most dangerous and invageling Dalila is returned. Now it is that the wings of the soul grow again and better. It moves more freely, being delivered from what did hither to clog and stay its heavenly flight, its journey upwards to use the expression of hierarchies. And as it prospers in its sincere and earnest endeavors to purge and cleanse itself from all that within which is contrary to God by the same degrees and proportions it revives and becomes more lively, active and vivacious. It is collected within itself and is filled with divine strength and power and unites itself to the fountain of intellectual purity and perfection, close quote. Such a passage and there are many such reminds us strongly of Smith. It is everywhere the well accustomed speech rich in spiritual aim but darkened by neoplatonic or cabalistic or apocalyptic allusion that addresses us both in the discourses and in the miscellanies which however bear a nearer resemblance to some of more speculations. It must be allowed at the same time that there is a distinct vein of manner if not of thought in Worthington, a vein of practical earnestness, tenderness, and spiritual vivacity which gives the impression which we also gather from his life that his natural sphere of labor was the pulpit and that he must have excelled as a preacher. His successive promotions and his appointment as lecturer at Hackney indicate this. We are told in fact by his son who originally edited his discourses and characterizes them as the substance of sundry parcels of sermons that he was very successful in his ministry. He had great cause to be thankful to God for the fruit of his labors, some of very different persuasions and that had wandered through all forms placing the kingdom of God in opinions and extra essentials being by his practical teaching awakened to other thoughts and receiving settlement in better things as they themselves acknowledged and he heard also from others. Close quote. Tillotson who preached his funeral sermon gives the same impression. The character briefly drawn by the archbishop is not very descriptive but a few touches may be given from it. It considers Worthington, quote, chiefly in his profession in his accomplishment for it and his public usefulness in it. He had by the great industry and power of his whole life and God's blessing upon them furnished himself with a great stock of all excellent learning proper to his profession especially with that which did more immediately conduced to the knowledge of the holy scriptures the best and most proper skill of a divine. Thus he was peculiarly fitted to teach and instruct others and that the doctrine might be the more effectual he showed himself in all things a follower of good works and taught others nothing but what he had first learned himself. His whole demeanor was pious and grave and yet not blemished with any moroseness or fond affectation. He was universally inoffensive kind and obliging even to those that differed from him. Especially in debates and controversies of religion he was not apt to be passionate and contentious remembering that the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God but that which was most singularly eminent in him was the publicness of his spirit and his great zeal and industry to be useful especially in those things which tended to the promoting of piety and learning. Close quote. His addition of the works of Joseph Mead the famous expositor of the apocalypse especially mentioned as an instance of his industry. Footnote. The works of the pious and profoundly learned Mr. Joseph Mead, B.D., some time fellow of Christ College Cambridge in five books Folio. Mead died in 1638 before the rise of the Platonic School but there is considerable affinity between certain trains of their thought not the best or most rational and his speculations. End of footnote. The addition cost him infinite pains for several years together. It would be difficult to find so vast a work that was ever published with more exactness. Worthington married a niece of Witchcoat so that he was connected not only by mental but by personal ties with the Platonic Brotherhood. Footnote. In a former page we have said that we had been unable to learn anything of Witchcoat's marriage. An interesting letter which has reached us from Massachusetts from the reverend Henry A. Miles D.D. in reference to the appearance of the chapter on Witchcoat in the Contemporary Review, October 1871, gives the information that Witchcoat's wife was the widow of Matthew Craddock, a wealthy London merchant and the first governor of the company of Massachusetts Bay. In 1650 Mrs. Witchcoat petitioned the general court of Massachusetts for the payment of a sum of money alleged to be due to her former husband and later the court voted that in consideration of the great disbursements of Mr. Craddock in planting the colony, one thousand acres of land be given to Dr. Witchcoat and his wife Rebecca. We have to thank our correspondent for this information which it has been pleasant to receive from an American student and admirer of Witchcoat's aphorisms. And a footnote. His letters and diary reveal the intimacy of this connection in numberless ways. If somewhat disappointing they are yet full of curious information and open up familiar glimpses into the domestic as well as academic life of the 17th century. There are love letters and scraps of poetry and pathetic details of family suffering and criticisms of new books and public events. Writing to Mrs. Mary Witchcoat at her father's house at Frogmore on the eve of his marriage in September 1657, he expresses himself with all the ardor of an impatient lover. It is now a week since I left Frogmore which upon other occasions is accounted no long time but to me it is a week many times told. For the present I place myself in the constant remembrance of your loves and sweetnesses and all these your lovely and endearing perfections both of body and mind, disposition and deportment, not forgetting your music, and I shall hasten to prepare for that happy time of enjoying your ever-desired company and the crowning of our affections, for love affects not delays. Close quote. And nothing can be more pleasing and prettily becoming than the lady's reply. Quote. Your welcome lines are come to hand than which nothing but yourself could have been more welcome to me, in which you have expressed a great deal of love to me and that far above my deserving. I cannot but acknowledge the moving of my heart to you that of all the men that ever I saw if I were to choose of ten thousand my heart would not close with any as with yourself. You having such knowledge, goodness and a lovely disposition which you have manifested to me and suitableness of temper and in my eye no person so desirable. Love covereth a multitude of faults and I am persuaded that your love and wisdom will cover my weaknesses. Close quote. Footnote. Diary in correspondence one eighty-six to eighty-eight. Worthington subscribes himself to his dearest lady, Madam, your servant, and she responds, Honored sir, your servant. He seems to have composed a pastoral epithelium on the occasion of his marriage in which euphonious names and shepherds and shepherdesses make the usual figure. We give the four opening lines. Come, come, fair nymphs, your garlands bring, strew all the ground with flowers. Come, gentle shepherds, leave your flocks, retire into these bowers. End of footnote. End of chapter six, part one. Section twenty-one of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, volume two by John Tullock. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter six, minor members of the Cambridge School, part two. But we cannot pause over such details. George Rust, the next in our group, appears far less prominently in connection with the movement than Worthington, although he attained a more prominent ecclesiastical position. He is the eloquent, although somewhat inflated and artificial panagiarist of Jeremy Taylor and, our readers may remember, is strongly recommended by Cudworth to Cromwell's Secretary of State, John Thurlow, has an understanding, pious, discreet man, of exceeding good parts and a general scholar but who seemed unwilling to divert himself from preaching and divinity to any civil service. This was probably in 1657 and at this time Rust was a fellow of Christ's College where he had been educated. Footnote. Cudworth's letter is undated as printed by Birch. End of footnote. After the restoration he went to Ireland at Taylor's solicitation and was first of all appointed Dean of Connor and then, on Taylor's death in 1667, he succeeded him as Bishop of Dromore which was divided from Down and Connor and constituted into a separate bishopric. He survived his promotion only three years, having caught a fever which cut him off in the end of 1670. Rust is chiefly known and connected with our subject as the author of A Discourse of Truth given to the world in 1682 under the editorship of Glanville who speaks of him in the highest terms as, quote, a man of a clear mind, a deep judgment and a searching wit, greatly learned in all the best sorts of knowledge old and new, a thoughtful and diligent inquirer of a free understanding and vast capacity joined with singular modesty and unusual sweetness of temper which made him the darling of all that knew him. He was one of the first in the university, Cambridge, who overcame the prejudices of the education of the times and was very instrumental to enlarge others. He had too great a soul for the trifles of that age and saw early the nakedness of phrases and fancies. He outgrew the pretended orthodoxy of those days and addicted himself to the primitive learning and theology in which he became a great master, close quote. The Discourse of Truth and Sermon on the Death of Taylor hardly bear out these encomiums of Glanville. There is a lack of life, freshness, and strength of thought in both. The Discourse has an air of elaboration in the sections into which it was probably divided by the editor. It is also upon the whole clearly and well written, but it has no substance or originality of argument. It is like reading Cudworth over in a minor and diluted form. It overdoes altogether the argument in opposition to the idea of the divine as a mere arbitrary will. Quote. Can infinite wisdom itself make the damning of all the innocent and the unspotted angels in heaven a proportionate means to declare and manifest the unmeasurableness of his grace and love and goodness towards them? Can lying, swearing, envy, malice, nay, hatred of God and goodness itself be made the most acceptable service of God and the readiest way to a man's happiness? Close quote. For all these consequences seem to the author to follow from the denial that there are things or in his own language mutual respects and relations of things, irrespective of the divine will. Quote. If the nature of God be such that his arbitrarious imagination that such and such things have such and such natures and dependencies doth make these things to have those natures and dependencies, then he may as easily unimagined that imagination. Contradictions are true if God will understand them so, and then the foundation of all knowledge is taken away. Close quote. If will as such be the only principle of the divine actions, then changeableness rather than unchangeableness must be a perfection of the divine nature. Quote. For it is the nature of an arbitrarious principle to act or not, to do or undo, upon no account but its own will or pleasure. Close quote. There is much of the same sort of reasoning, but little advance of thought, a thoroughly rational and enlightened spirit and intention, but no largeness of grasp or comprehension. Truth is described as twofold. Truth in things or in the object and truth in the understanding or the subject. The first order of truth is nothing else than those necessary mutual respects and relations of things to the proof and illustration or rather repeated affirmation of which the discourse is almost entirely devoted. It comes after all to this, that things necessarily are what they are, ex natura, not ex volontate. Stats pro radione voluntas is the height of all falsehood. And the truth of things being thus immutable, truth in us is nothing but the conformity of our ideas with the immutable reality of things. All truth that is in any created being is by participation and derivation from the first understanding and fountain of intellectual light. And that truth in the power of faculty is nothing but the conformity of its conception or ideas with the natures and relations of things is clear and evident in itself and necessarily follows from what hath been formerly proved concerning the truth of things in themselves antecedently to any understanding or will. For things are what they are and cannot be otherwise without a contradiction and their mutual respects and dependencies eternal and unchangeable so that the conceptions and ideas of these natures and their relations can only be so far true as they conform and agree with the things themselves and the harmony which they have to one another. This is the clear voice of the Platonic school and Rust seems thoroughly to have imbibed its spirit and influence. He appears also to have been an earnest, thoughtful man, deeply interested in the progress of truth and an enlightened Christian philosophy. But there is no such significance in his character or his brief writings as to claim for him more prominence in our pages. The discourse from which we have quoted is only about 30 pages and seems to have been an enlarged university sermon. Of Fowler, who became Bishop of Glouster, 1691, and Patrick, who was successively Bishop of Chichester and of Ely after the Revolution, we have already spoken in connection with the contemporary estimates formed of our school and the controversies which it called forth. Both names are associated with the defense of the latitude men or latitudeinarians as the Cambridge Divines were then called. Fowler's authorship of the Free Discourse, 1670, in which the principles and practices of these Divines are discussed is beyond question. But whether Simon Patrick was the SP who describes the new sect and gives a brief account of the new philosophy in a letter to a friend at Oxford, 1662, remains doubtful. Both, however, were undoubted offshoots of the school. Patrick was trained at Cambridge throughout and took his degree of MA in 1651, at the very time at which which Coates influence was rising to its height. Fowler was only partially educated at Cambridge, but he also took his master's degree there as a member of Trinity College about 1655. His father appears to have been a Presbyterian minister, or at least was ejected for nonconformity after the restoration. But the son did not inherit any of the father's scruples, and attracting the favourable notice of Sheldon, he gradually rose from one important position to another till he attained the Sea of Gloucester. He is mainly known by a treatise on the design of Christianity which followed his Free Discourse in little more than a year and was intended as a sequel to the defense of the Cambridge doctrines which he had adventured in the preceding volume. Footnote. The full title of this treatise is The Design of Christianity or a plain demonstration and improvement of this proposition vis that the undoing men with inward real righteousness and true holiness was the ultimate end of our saviours coming into the world and is the great intentment of his blessed gospel. 1671. End of Footnote. John Bunyan attacked this book with great vigor. It appeared to him in its advocacy of a moral Christianity to upset the cardinal doctrine of justification by faith in Jesus Christ as the only source of gospel holiness and he issued from his prison at Bedford a violent polemic against it. The teaching was such, he said, as gave just offense to Christian ears and the author himself was a pretended minister of the word who had quote violently exposed to public view the rottenness of his heart on principles diametrically opposite to the simplicity of the gospel of Christ. Close quote. Fowler unhappily had not the forbearance to receive Bunyan's abuse with silence or contempt. He replied in a pamphlet entitled Dirt wiped out or a manifest discovery of the gross ignorance, erroneousness and most un-Christian and wicked spirit of one John Bunyan lay preacher at Bedford. The contents of the pamphlet were only too suitable to the title. He designated the author of the pilgrim's progress as quote a wretched scribbler a most foul-mouthed columninator so very dirty a creature that he disdains to dirty his fingers with him. Close quote. This slight glimpse of Fowler's controversial art is enough to show that whatever he had learned at Cambridge in intercourse with the moderate divines there whom he admired and defended he had also learned in other schools. He was in fact much more of a pamphlet tier and a politician than a thinker of any sort. He had but slight hold of the principles of the Cambridge theology and has sketched them as we have already remarked from a superficial and somewhat confused point of view. In any case his main activity like that of Patrick belongs to the period of the revolution. He followed our thinkers. He was no doubt greatly influenced by them and imbibed some of their characteristic although by no means their most profound and inward principles. He defended them heartily and manfully if with an inadequate appreciation but he does not after all belong to them. His intellectual temper is too slight and his personal ambition too prominent. The type of latitude characteristic of the revolution and which Fowler more distinctly represents was different from that of the Platonic school. By this time the higher philosophical inspiration of the movement had spent itself. It had become practical, political, and ambitious. This further aspect of the general impulse of rational thought has also its heroes one of them at least Tillitson of high wisdom and noble character but it is beyond our present scope. For the same reason we do little more than allude to Patrick whose personal and theological significance might otherwise have claimed an extended notice. A friend and protege of Wichcote and Cudworth the contemporary and admirer of Henry More and confidential pupil of John Smith. Patrick had not only such close personal associations with the Platonic school but he imbibed at least in a profounder sense than Fowler its characteristic spirit. There is in some of his writings a vein of tender mysticism and in others a grave spiritual earnestness which show that he had not merely caught up its tone but had been inwardly touched by its contemplative enthusiasm. Yet even Patrick's mysticism is practical rather than ideal the sentiment of the preacher rather than of the thinker. There is little in all his writings to remind us of the deeper speculations of Cudworth or of More. He is preacher, controversialist, scriptural expositor and bishop but in no respect philosopher. He has carried away the air of the Cambridge Divinity it breathes through his practical writings and sermons but he has done nothing to advance its thought or enrich its fruitfulness. His liberality like that of Fowler is the more common place and worldly liberality of the Revolution period which adopted and applied the Cambridge Principles rather than intellectually lived in them. And there is in both even in Patrick with his richer culture and genuine spirituality a capacity of polemical coarseness which is foreign to the platonic temper and separates them from the genuine spirit of the movement. It was difficult for theologians who engaged in public life after the Restoration to avoid polemical violence but it is the special glory of the School of Thought in both its phases which we have aimed to sketch in these volumes that not one of its writers ever soiled their pens by vituperative abuse or that species of advocacy which insinuates evil motives in an opponent instead of replying to his arguments. It is highly noteworthy to what extent moderation of dogmatic opinion and breadth of philosophical and theological insight have been in all Christian history associated with moderation of Christian temper and the courtesies of controversy while extreme dogmatists of every school in the very rashness of their confidence have too often disgrace their cause by unchristian harshness. There are instances no doubt in which moderate opinions have been defended without moderation but such instances as in the examples of Fowler and Patrick will almost invariably be found in those who have adopted moderation as a side rather than worked it out for themselves as a principle who in short follow in the wake rather than add to the rank of rational thinkers. Footnote This may be said of Stilling Fleet who is the only one in our list of theologians to whom the complementary statement of the text can be held to apply with any qualification. He is only partially a member of the rational brotherhood and it is not in connection with it or advocacy of any of its principles that he makes use of harsh controversial weapons. End of footnote. Bishop Wilkins is mentioned by Burnett along with our Cambridge Divines in his well-known description quoted in the opening chapter of this volume. Burnett's statement is that Wilkins quote joined at Cambridge with those who studied to propagate better thoughts to take men off from being in parties or from narrow notions from superstitious conceits and fierceness about opinions. This is true. To great gifts and a most varied intellectual activity Wilkins united a moderate temper and was a strong advocate for comprehension after the restoration. But he cannot in any true sense be called a member or even an adherent of the Cambridge School. Almost all his academic connection is with Oxford where he was educated and where he was warden of Wadham College during all the period from 1647 to 1667 that the Cambridge theologians were in their highest activity. He was a Calvinist moreover of a somewhat strict type and allied to the dominant party during the same period far more closely than any of our theologians can be said to be. Wilkins was an excellent mathematician and a great observer and promoter of experimental philosophy. But he had comparatively little genius for religious speculation and none of the platonic enthusiasm which is the special note of our confederation of writers. Footnote Many of Wilkins's physical speculations seem to have been of a really original kind such as his speculations as to the planetary system the habitable character of the moon and his mercury or the secret and swift messenger showing how a man may with privacy and speed communicate his thoughts to a friend at a distance. 1641 He was also the author of a remarkable essay toward a real character and a philosophical language. He was married to Cromwell's sister and enjoyed certain advantages from this connection during the Commonwealth. End of footnote There are still two other names which must be mentioned. One has already crossed us frequently while the other carries forward to another age the impulse of platonic idealism. We mean Joseph Glanville and John Norris. Both men were Oxford students and much younger Norris greatly younger than any of the Cambridge divines but they were alike fascinated by the character and speculations of Moore and warm admirers of his genius. In Moore's later years Glanville seems almost to have been his special friend. They encouraged each other in their spiritualistic delusions and after Glanville's death in 1680 at the early age of 44 his work on witchcraft was reissued with large additions by Moore under the title by which it is generally known of Sadus Seismus Triumphantus. Norris again opened a correspondence with the venerable Platonist in his closing years and nourished his fresh platonic fire at the dying embers of a genius which had so long dwelt on its transcendental heights. Footnote This correspondence is very curious and interesting. It is found annexed to one of Norris' earliest books The Theory and Regulation of Love a moral essay in two parts to which are added letters philosophical and moral between the author and Dr. Henry Moore Oxford 1688 and a footnote Glanville's early promise was very unlike his later defense of witchcraft yet there is an intelligible consistency from his own point of view in all the stages of his development. His work on The Vanity of Dogmatizing first appeared in 1661 when he was only 25 years of age. Worthington saw in it the traces of juvenile heat but augured we have seen higher things of the author when the wine of his genius had fully ripened. His genius never reached anything higher except in the late edition of the same work 1665 which was considerably altered and more carefully elaborated under the special title of Skepsis Scientifica. The special object of this work as its name implies is to prove the vanity of dogmatism or confidence in opinions from the uncertainty attaching to all our sources of knowledge. It runs over with a rapid, fluent and occasionally brilliant pen the various instances of our ignorance as to the nature of soul and of body their union and mode of action it discourses of the fallacies of the senses and the imagination the errors imaged in us by the force of affection, custom and education and especially antiquity and authority. It devotes five considerable chapters to the Aristotelian philosophy with the view of showing its ineptness for the modern inquirer and the injurious bondage which it has exercised over the human mind and finally it closes with a spirited representation of all the evils of dogmatism as the fruit of untamed passions and an ungoverned spirit a disturber of the world and a source of ill manners immodesty and narrowness of mind. This work has been greatly admired and commended both by Hallam and Mr. Lecky. Footnote. Both writers also speak of the scarcity of the book especially of the second edition of 1665 A remarkable work says Hallam but one so scarce as to be hardly known at all but so far as our experience goes the book is by no means unknown in both editions. End of footnote. It deserves a great deal of the commendation bestowed upon it it has the felicity upon which the author himself set so much value of clear and distinct thinking it is fluent and here and there brilliant both in sentiment and expression especially it is lively and readable throughout and many of its happy and pregnant sentences remain in the memory with all it is marked by little originality or depth of thought its intellectual life runs thinly with all its vivacity and rhetorical glitter it is deficient in arrangement a common fault of the period but more noticeable in this case from the brevity of the work which even in its later form is little more than a pamphlet of less than two hundred widely printed pages it is in short an amazingly clever book which gathered up and applied to philosophy as well as theology the advancing tendencies of the time but there is little evidence that Glanville had worked out for himself the new spirit which he applies so aptly or that his clever criticism comes forth from any fullness of rational light in his own mind many of his best sayings against contentiousness and dogmatism in religion and the ridiculous value attached to authority and antiquity are but echoes of what Hales had said before although he may not have been indebted to the golden remains published only two years before his own book he certainly makes no allusion to it his personal allusions are confined to the great philosophic names of the period Descartes, Hobbes, Moore and along with these philosophic notabilities Sir Kenham Digby whose portrait has drawn by Clarendon we formerly quoted footnote we do not profess to have studied Sir Cade Digby's treatises but we have looked into them they are not very readable yet they show more solid labor and even subtlety of disquisition than we could have supposed possible from the versatile and restless character attributed to him c volume 1 page 106 to 108 Digby lived as implied in the text to return to England at the restoration and to delivered at Gresham College in the beginning of 1660 a discourse concerning the vegetation of plants this with another brief essay on the powder of sympathy is bound up with the two treatises referred to in the text another brief tract of his conference with a lady upon choice of religion attracted some attention end of footnote Digby after his retirement to Paris became a philosopher and published there in 1644 two elaborate treatises one on bodies and another on man's soul he and his theories attracted some renewed attention at the restoration the digby and hypothesis as to the genesis of memory is enumerated by Glanville in conjunction with the Aristotelian Cartesian and Hobbian and receives an equal share of attention nothing comes amiss to his flowing easy pen great and small are touched happily but lightly and superficially this is the general character of the work it is a rapid facile striking and eloquent criticism from the hand of a student with the boldness and dash but also with something of the rawness characteristic of juvenile effort the following are a few specimens of its happy manner we reverence gray-headed doctrines though feeble decrepit and within a step of dust the beauty of a truth as of a picture is not acknowledged but at a distance skeptic scientifica page 102 in allusion to Aristotle he says if we owe it to him that we know so much tis perhaps lazy of his fond adorers that we know so little more I can see no ground why his reason should be textuary to ours or that God or nature ever intended him and universal headship does this vain idolizing of authors which gave birth to that silly vanity of impertinent citations and inducing authority in things neither requiring nor deserving it tis an inglorious acquist to have our heads or volumes laden as were Cardinal Campeas his mules with old and useless luggage and yet the magnificence of many high pretenders to science if laid open by a true discovery would amount to no more than the old boots and shoes of that proud and exposed ambassador authorities alone with me make no number unless evidence of reason stand before them page 105 106 tis no good fishing for verity in troubled waters page 122 Opinions are the rattles of immature intellects true knowledge is modest and wary tis ignorance that is bold and presuming they that never peeped beyond the common belief in which their easy understandings were first indoctrinated are strongly assured of the truth and comparative excellency of their receptions while the larger souls that have traveled the diver's climates of opinion are more cautious in their resolves and more sparing to determine page 167 The union of a sect within itself is a pitiful charity it's no concord of Christians but a conspiracy against Christ and they that love one another for their opinionative concurrences love for their own sakes and not their lords not because they have his image but because they bear one another's page 169 None of Glanville's subsequent writings equal this early essay they are without its brilliancy and they have not acquired in compensation depth or solidity they have nearly all, moreover, lost in rationality his lux orientalis is nothing but a lighter and weaker reproduction of Moore's dreams about the pre-existence of souls and his sadus sismus triumfatus which has already more than once come in our way is one of the most singular compounds of philosophy and credulity in the world Mr. Lecky has said of this book that it is probably the ablest ever published in defense of witchcraft the statement astonishes us for with the exception of some ingenious argument in the first part on the possibility of spiritual existences under the form of witches and apparitions and the chapters on the notion of spirit translated from Moore's metaphysics the book is nothing but a collection of ghost stories or supposed manifestations of demons some of them of a singularly silly and uninteresting description footnote the first part seems originally to have been the whole book the sixth edition of this smaller volume corrected and enlarged under the name of a blow at modern sadus sism lies before us bearing the date 1668 it was not till after Glanville's death that the book was published in its enlarged form under the title of sadus sismus triumfatus in 1681 and Moore's additions were not added till the following year end of footnote the excitement caused by certain disturbances in a house at Tedworth seems quite to have upset Moore and Glanville's mind and both devoted themselves to the collection of instances corroborative of the agency of demons and the devil the controversy became general and exciting Dr. Merrick Casabon, the dean of Canterbury, joined in it Glanville plainly believed the whole question of the supernatural to be at stake and labored zealously for the cause as for the life of religion all the while he was plunged in a controversy on behalf of the new royal society and the right of free scientific inquiry his pluse ultra or the progress and advancement of knowledge since the days of Aristotle was a vigorous defense of the spirit of physical research everywhere spreading in opposition to scholasticism nothing can be more singular than this combination of credulity and love of free inquiry in Glanville it is not merely as in Cudworth or others the fact of the belief in witchcraft lying alongside other traditionary beliefs in a mind otherwise of great power and rationality this is perfectly conceivable but it is the case of an acute lively intellect whose whole natural activity seems developed in the defense of skepticism embracing equally the defense of witchcraft with a sort of fanaticism he makes the same vigorous and intrepid fight for witches and for the royal society and to crown the curious combination he draws a picture of anti-fanatical religion and free philosophy in which he no less pointedly attacks the various fanatical sectaries and defends very much in the spirit of Fowler the moderate theology this latter writing which appeared in a volume of essays on several important subjects in philosophy and religion in 1676 brings him once more into direct contact with our school it was designed in continuation of Bacon's New Atlantis to give a narrative of a visit to an angelical country under the name of Ben Salam and to describe the happy state of religion there under this thin guise Glanville depicts the character of the rational divines whom he admired and with whom he associated quote they thought it not enough to read a few systems to understand the correct orthodoxy of the times or to gain the faculty of speaking to the people in the taking tone and phrase but they read the histories of the church and the fathers of the first three centuries in them they looked for the doctrine and practice that were in the beginning and considered that religion was most pure in those primitive times they inquired into the reasonableness of the great principles of religion and provided themselves thereby to deal with atheists infidels and enthusiasts they asserted liberty of judgment but bounded it with so much caution that no prejudice could arise to legal establishments they knew that truth would have the advantage could it but procure an impartial trial they considered often and filled their thoughts with a great sense of the narrowness of human capacity and the imperfections of our largest knowledge they were not so fond of their own opinions as to think them necessary for all others nor were they infected with the common zeal to spread and propagate every truth they thought they knew their main design was to make men good not notional and knowing they studied in the places where some of the chief of the puritan sects governed and preached publicly this they scrupled not because they were young and had been under no explicit engagements to those laws that were then unhappily overruled in those and other university exercises they much saved the interest of the church of benzolem by undermining the attack sites for so the sectaries were called in order to cure the madness of the age they were zealous to make men sensible that reason is a branch and beam of the divine wisdom that light which god hath put into our minds and that law which he hath written upon our hearts that faith itself is an act of reason and built upon the two reasonable principles that there is a god and that what he saith is true according to such principles they managed their discourses close quote it is needless to enlarge extracts they might be indefinitely multiplied in many significant touches to the same effect nothing can be more transparent than glanville's aim to vindicate the rational position and character of the platonic divines and his vindication upon the whole is more effective as it is more vivid than that of fowler or the brief account of the new sect of latitude men by sp it fails like them in adequate criticism and grasp of principles in their relation to one another and it is deficient in order of thought like all his books but his lively and acute force of analysis and varied felicity of expression give an interesting and graphic picture and bring the attitude of the school distinctly before us footnote nothing for example can be more graphic than the following description of more's philosophical position in Descartes they the divines whom the author is describing quote found a prodigious wit and clear thoughts and a wonderfully ingenious fabric of philosophy which they thought to be the neatest mechanical system of things that had appeared in the world yet some of them who thought highly of this mechanical wit and believe that he had carried matter and motion as far as they would go declared earnestly against the completeness and perfection of his hypotheses and learnedly showed that the mechanical principles alone would not solve the phenomena these judged that nothing could be done in physiology without admitting the platonical logoi sprematicoi and spirit of nature and so would have the mechanical principles aided by the vital as to moral philosophy they did by no means approve of the contentious disputing ethics that made it to be rather as Cicero speaks ostentatio scientiae than lex vitae but they founded them upon the excellent knowledge of human nature and passions and formed their knowledge into solid rules of life close quote anti fanatical religion and free philosophy 1676 page 51 end of footnote glanville's peculiar position as a thinker and his relation to the cambridge school on both sides of his mind on the weaker credulous side no less than on the rational and skeptical side naturally claimed so much notice after worthington and rust he is oxford man as he was the most direct expression of the same spirit and mind as cut worth and more with the latter of whom he has besides so many personal associations norris is also brought into direct connection with more he conducted a correspondence with them philosophical and moral but otherwise he stands aside not indeed from our subject but from our history his philosophical activity only commences with the termination of the cambridge movement he carries it forward to another age but he does not himself belong to it norris indeed stands by himself in the history of english philosophy the solitary platonist of the revolution era who handed on the torch of idealism into the next century till it was grasped by the vigorous and graceful hands of barkley it may be difficult to trace any direct connection betwixt the author of the principles of human knowledge and the author of the theory of the ideal or intelligible world footnote barkley's theory of vision was published in 1709 and his principles of human knowledge a year later before norris's death the theory of the ideal or intelligible world was published the first part in 1701 and the second part in 1704 and a footnote there may have been no indebtedness on the part of the doublin idealist to the idealist of bemerton but the impulse of thought is the same the line of platonic speculation runs forward from the one to the other norris has comparatively passed out of sight and barkley is a familiar name to every student of philosophy but norris although a half forgotten is really a striking and significant figure in the history of english philosophy he was an idealist of the purist type sustained by the loftiest inspiration his fine genius exquisite spiritual sensibility and tender exaltation of character well-deserved niche by itself in the temple of idealism chronological limits exclude him from our series but it is a happy chance which enables us to connect the last links of the Cambridge school with a name so honored and a philosophy so elevated as that of john norris footnote norris may be said to be connected with cudworth as well as more through lady mashham with whom he had a controversy as to the nature of divine love and a footnote some readers will perhaps miss in the foregoing enumeration of platonic writers in the 17th century the name of sir thomas brown author of religio medici and christian morals brown undoubtedly belongs to the platonic type of thought and is highly deserving of criticism both as a thinker and writer but he does not come into any contact with our series of writers and we have not been able to find a place for him without diverging from the historical sequence which we have more or less sought to preserve in these sketches as an author he preceded considerably any of the Cambridge Platonists the religio medici having been published in 1643 and having been written it is supposed nearly 10 years earlier he survived it is true the restoration 22 years and his mixed devotion to science and credulity his love of a comprehensive and liberal christianity his quaint enthusiasm and love of pleasantry his vivacious and garrulous mysticism which people the world around him with spiritual agencies and saw in it everywhere the picture of the invisible closely ally him with such writers as more and glanville unconnected by any external bonds he represents with them the same combination of inquiry and faith the same yearning towards higher forms of truth and the same love and fondness for the past the same eclecticism in thought and must we not also say the same dreamy religious imaginativeness more beautiful than strong more picturesque and ideal than practically earnest self-denying and victorious end of chapter six part two